LONDON — Over the
last eight years at London’s City Hall, Boris Johnson built a
reputation as a modern, serious and open-minded politician in tune
with the changing world.

In barely eight
weeks on the Brexit campaign trail, Johnson has damaged, if not
shattered, that cultivated image. His transition from the mayor’s
office to national politics is best known so far for missteps, gaffes
and underwhelming results. No one’s counting out the ambitious
politician from the longer race to lead the Conservative Party, but
this wasn’t how the Boris coming out party was supposed to go.

When Johnson emerged
from his north London home on Sunday February 21, scrunching his
unruly mop of hair as he addressed the media scrum to announce his
bombshell decision to throw his weight behind Brexit, it was seen as
a win-win. If Britain voted for Brexit, Prime Minister David Cameron
would resign and Johnson would reign triumphant. If the Leave
campaign lost, the majority of deeply Euroskeptic Tory party members
would see him as a principled hero. Either way, he was setting
himself up well to be Britain’s next prime minister.

This
campaign has turned him from a guy whose appeal is broader than the
party to a guy confined to the party.

His decision sparked
fury at Number 10 and caused the pound to plunge. Since that winter
Sunday, Cameron’s campaign to remain in the EU has stormed into a
commanding 14 percent lead in the polls. The former London mayor is
left to rail about EU banana regulation and compare the ambitions
behind the European project with Hitler’s Germany.

“The danger is in
two months he’s undone what he did in two terms as mayor to
increase his popularity and credibility,” one long-standing admirer
said. “As somebody who is deeply loyal to him, that’s what I find
depressing about the stance he’s taken on Brexit.”

With only a month to
go until the June 23 referendum, Johnson is struggling to articulate
a case for leaving that elevates him above loveable gags or the Tory
right’s fondness for rather dry arguments about sovereignty. His
supporter added: “Boris’ great appeal and the reason he was
reelected in London is that his appeal transcended the rather narrow
ranks of the Tory party. But in an odd way this campaign has turned
him from a guy whose appeal is broader than the party to a guy whose
appeal is almost confined to the party.”

The source, who did
not want to be named because of his continuing loyalty to the former
mayor, said Johnson’s crack last month that President Barack
Obama’s “part-Kenyan” heritage gave him an “ancestral dislike
of the British empire” was particularly damaging. It allowed people
to think — wrongly — that Johnson had a racist streak, he said,
adding that “the whole thing was pretty awful.”

For some of his
allies, the Kenyan episode captures a problem Johnson created for
himself by backing Brexit. “Boris’ whole thing is authenticity,
but everybody knows Boris doesn’t believe in pulling out of the
EU,” said another senior Tory.

As the campaign goes
on, Johnson risks losing the credibility that his supporters say sets
him apart from the rest. Without it, he is just another posh white
man who went to Eton wanting to run the country.

Johnson’s
immigration trap

Johnson’s closest
allies say he decided to campaign to leave the European Union because
he couldn’t stomach the claim Britain was unable to thrive on its
own. But he has had particular trouble rebutting the Cameron camp’s
arguments about the economic risk of leaving the EU.

The pollster Andrew
Cooper, who was Cameron’s director of strategy at Number 10, said
those concerns are central to undecided voters, who make up around a
quarter of the electorate. “They are defined by the fact that they
are risk averse. They want facts. They want serious arguments. They
want substance,” Cooper said. “They want credible reasons to
think it will be OK so they can vote with their hearts to leave.

“What he is doing
— the language he is using — he is simply talking to their hearts
and that’s not enough to switch them,” he added. “They agree
with him and they will cheer him for saying it, but that’s not
enough to get them to leave the European Union.”

“In
London it was a completely opposite persona to what he is doing now
in the referendum, which does beg the question – will the real
Boris Johnson please stand up?” — the pollster Andrew
Cooper

For Cooper, Johnson
has if anything had a negative impact on the Leave campaign. “During
the time he’s been going round the country on a bus the Remain lead
has clearly been going up, not down.”

The influential
pollster — a key figure in the Conservative “modernizing” camp
that backed Cameron’s bid to overhaul the party’s image — said
Johnson’s problems would only deteriorate as the campaign wore on
because the Leave camp would have to focus on immigration. “They
basically have to keep going back to immigration because that’s the
only strong argument they’ve got,” he said.

Cooper’s analysis
is supported — albeit for different reasons — by the UKIP leader
Nigel Farage, who has publicly defended Johnson. Speaking with
POLITICO, Farage said the debate would soon turn to immigration. “I
think the issue about controlling our lives will, in the end, come
down to control of the borders. If the Leave campaign can make that
argument powerfully enough the other side cannot fight back against
it.”

The trouble is
Johnson the mayor was never anti-immigration. As Cooper put it: “In
London it was a completely opposite persona to what he is doing now
in the referendum, which does beg the question: Will the real Boris
Johnson please stand up?”

The allegation that
Johnson does not really back Brexit goes back to the days he was
prevaricating about which side he was on. To his accusers, he put his
ambition to be prime minister above the interests of the country.
Even after declaring for Brexit he appeared to leave the option open
of a second renegotiation and referendum in which he could support a
vote to remain. Cameron rubbed salt into the wound last week by
claiming Johnson had told lots of Conservative MPs that he was not an
Outer.

Question marks over
his motivations appear to have undermined his support in the
Conservative Party and the general public. In the last poll of Tory
members on who should be the next leader, Johnson slipped to fourth.
His pro-Brexit ally, Justice Secretary Michael Gove, jumped to the
front of the queue. Even Home Secretary Theresa May, who is
campaigning for a Remain vote, now sits above him in third place.

“He
could be destroying himself as a serious figure, but that’s why
we’re watching — it’s dangerous. He’s on a zip wire and he’s
not even tied on.” — biographer Andrew Gimson

The senior Tory
source said Johnson’s lack of seriousness has also been exposed.
“When you are at the top of politics like the prime minister or
chancellor or home secretary then everything is tested — everything
you say — and that is a new experience for him and he’s been
found wanting, very obviously.”

Teflon Boris

The accusations of
Johnsonian unseriousness aren’t new. “All of the people who have
always dismissed him as a clown and a buffoon are now saying it all
over again,” his biographer Andrew Gimson said.

Gimson warned the
dangers to the former mayor’s career were serious, but also that he
should not be written off yet. “The more establishment figures like
Cameron and [former deputy prime minister Michael] Heseltine line up
against him, the more a certain type of free-born Englishman will say
‘good for Boris.’”

Once detailed
memories of the campaign have faded, voters may well remember Johnson
standing up to an American president who told Brits how to vote in
their referendum, he added. “He could be destroying himself as a
serious figure, but that’s why we’re watching — it’s
dangerous,” Gimson said. “He’s on a zip wire and he’s not
even tied on.”

The Conservative MP
James Cleverly, a close ally who worked with the former London mayor
in City Hall before entering parliament last year, said Johnson
always proved doubters wrong. “It’s an argument that keeps being
replayed and it’s an argument that keeps being wrong,” Cleverly
said. “He shows over and over again that he can be himself and
still maintain that balance between being credible and being
popular.”

A landslide for
Remain could leave lasting damage. “I think it’s a legitimate
concern that being on the losing side of this argument will dent that
history of being successful against expectations,” Cleverly said.
“It would be naïve not to acknowledge that.”

“He’s
an affable, benign Donald Trump.”

Another Conservative
MP, a close ally of the former London mayor, said the sniping at
Johnson was simply a ploy to undermine his leadership chances. He’s
competing foremost against Cameron’s preferred successor,
Chancellor George Osborne. “This is the stuff pumped out by the
George Osborne lot who say what you really need is something very
boring. We tried the George Osborne-type campaign in London and look
what happened,” said the MP, who asked to remain anonymous. “The
reality is Boris has done a pretty good job on the campaign — he’s
stimulated people up and down the country. How many people does
George Osborne pull in when he gets off a coach?”

In the end, the MP
added, Johnson will be judged on his record as a cabinet minister
when, as expected, he is promoted after the referendum in a “unity
reshuffle.” “The best way for Boris to answer his critics is if
the PM sticks to his word and gives him a big job to deliver in that
job.”

He said Johnson
retained far more appeal than any other Tory MP and this would be
crucial after nine years of Conservative-imposed austerity, and many
MPs would support him simply to stop Osborne, the face of that
austerity. “The easiest people to recruit are the Stop George camp
— it’s pretty big. I don’t know if Boris Johnson will be leader
of the party, but I bet my house on it that it won’t be George
Osborne.”

A source in Vote
Leave agreed that the sniping at Johnson exposed concerns in the
Remain campaign about the former mayor’s support. “The level of
personal abuse from Number 10 just shows how worried they are by
Boris. When you’re on the road with him it’s clear that he just
has a different effect on people.”

One man’s gaffe

People in the Leave
campaign accept mistakes have been made but insist that trying to
control him would backfire. Johnson also privately says that what
Westminster insiders believe to be “gaffes” only serve to help
people remember his interventions.

The consensus in the
media was that he undermined a serious speech on Britain’s future
outside the EU by being goaded into singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy
in German by reporters. Johnson believes it will only cement the
memory that he is no little Englander in people’s minds, people
close to him say.

Johnson’s camp
argue that the referendum campaign has essentially boiled down to
“the people versus the establishment” and that he is on the right
side of the fence, regardless of the result. He will always be able
to say he stood up for the ordinary voter whose heart wanted to
leave.

The former London
mayor is a great admirer of Ronald Reagan — the great optimist and
joker who made America feel good about itself.

Johnson, a cultured
classicist and liberal intellectual, now finds himself drawing less
favorable comparisons with another Republican TV star turned
politician. Cameron’s former pollster Cooper said that, like Donald
Trump, Johnson is popular because he is so unlike other politicians.
“He doesn’t behave like a politician, he doesn’t talk like a
politician, he doesn’t look like a politician — and nobody likes
politicians.

“He’s an
affable, benign Donald Trump.”

Whether this carries
Johnson to the highest office remains to be seen. Johnson should
certainly not be written off. But his road to Number 10 looks
significantly more winding than it did when he stood outside his
front door and declared that “with a huge amount of heartache” he
was backing Brexit.